Sister Weather

With Susanne Bürner, Ines Kaag, Annette Kelm, and Alexandra Leykauf 
Goethe-Institut Irland, 37 Merrion Square E, Dublin 2, D02 XK52 
Preview: Thursday, 17 September 2026, 6 pm 
Opening: Friday, 18 September 2026, 6 pm (Culture Night) 
Curated by Ben Livne Weitzman 

It's a drizzly Sunday morning. Down by the Ballydehob community hall, cars and trailers gather. Boots opening like clamshells. On display, today's treasures: rusty garden tools, floral china sets, children's books softening in the damp air. From second-hand to freshly baked, much is to be found on the trestle tables sprawling by the riverside. The car boot sale in West Cork is a tradition with many possible origins. A Catholic priest from Stockport is said to have introduced it to the UK as a charity fundraiser after seeing a similar “trunk fair” in Canada in the early 1970s. Others would claim it is really the descendant of the fair day — lá aonaigh. Markets and fairs in Ireland carry the memory of the aonach (fair) of the native Irish tradition and the margadh (market), a loanword from the Vikings.

Aonach derives from óen, “one”. Hence, the fair is a coming-into-one, a gathering. The fair day is where news from the next parish spreads, where matches are made, and where disputes are quietly resolved. It was to this ritual that Susanne Bürner, Ines Kaag, Annette Kelm, and Alexandra Leykauf kept returning during their residency in Glenkeen Garden, having arrived in the cool months and into near-constant rain. For Sister Weather, the group turns the Return Gallery into a car boot, against which the works lean and gather. Having worked together before on themes of mimicry and empathy, the four artists bring individual works whose constellation carries lasting impressions of the time spent in and around Glenkeen and West Cork. In Susanne Bürner's photographs, garden and wilderness are hard to tell apart, while on supermarket notice boards, handwritten messages wink at you across the mundane.

Alexandra Leykauf transforms unhinged refrigerator doors into stone circle stand-ins and tabletops into garden-like topographies by impressing everyday objects in vacuum-formed plastic.

Annette Kelm composes and photographs findings from her surroundings with the cool precision of a sales catalogue, as iPhones left lying on the floor by Ines Kaag (one half of the design duo BLESS) play videos of the artists hiding in the garden, mimicking birdcalls. Kaag herself appears in a selfie, blending into the boglands, woven into a blanket. It's always good to have a blanket in your car boot. 

It is worth noting that both sister and weather are also verbs. One (or more) can weather a storm, as a carpenter sisters a beam by fastening another alongside it, so they bear the load together.

By noon in Ballydehob, the boots close and the tarmac empties. This car boot in Dublin stays open a little longer. A soft day, thank God.